The waters will not overwhelm

The sky seems strained with panic. A flag beats against its post with the wind, desperate to flee like a wild animal caught in a trap, willing to leave limbs for life. It is black; Ali has died on the fields of Karbala. Clouds grieve and intermittently weep. When the rain stops helicopters propel the sound of disaster across the valley. When night falls, it sounds like the muezzin is mourning.

I had a knock on my gate the other morning. Please could I go and give condolences to the family whose son died of a drug overdose yesterday?

The helicopters look as big, up there, as the cockroaches who stormed my house one night, copulated and colonised. I clear the counter to make dinner and who have we here? Somebody snacking. I look up from reading a novel and -hullo- who's that having sex on the carpet? Some stop embarrassed in the night when the lights go on, caught creeping round the skirting board en route to other such liaisons. One dirty beast even had designs on me and on a candlelit evening wormed his way into my shirt.

But this little old spinster will not have it. She will not. There is a powder in the shops whose name sounds like death in every language I know of: mortein. But the criminal creatures do not know those languages, can not heed the warning. They step upon it and oh, how lovely it must be, they realise for the first time in their crawling little lives, to lie back and rest awhile. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest- and it is worse than poverty that comes upon them like a bandit.

Because that, friends, is how I find them when I flick on the light the next morning. They are mortified to be caught with their soft underbellies exposed. They try to flip back and slip away. Their feet, so sticky they can walk upside down, do not know air, that it offers no purchase. So they spend their final moments in a tantrum. Then their six kicking feet meet my one foot and our days have begun with death.

*******************************

High up in Hunza there is a lake, a sheet of shine between two craggy mountains with the tops of fruit trees growing out of it. In spring, submerged branches blossomed under water, vainly hoping bees would dive down and collect its pollen. And now, small water-logged fruits form for no one to farm, for the farmers have fled with their families and are staying in tents. Their homes are beneath those trees, beneath that shining surface that has risen higher and higher through spring as the river flowed and swelled with melting snow as it has always done. But there is a wall now, a whole new mountain in fact, that fell from another into the Indus. And so the river stops and waits till miles of it upstream rise higher than the mountain till it can once again be on its way.

A mountain of uncertainty has blocked the future. Everyone waits to see what the water will do, what the mountain will do. Still for centuries and constant in its flow respectively, rock and river push their tonnes against each other and eye-watering pressures build. Release will be so violent it will almost register on the Richter scale. 'The next 24 hours are critical,' the experts say. 'The next 24 hours,' they repeat, night after night.

But while the camera crews of the nations encircle the arena, just as the lake is level with the mountain, a small stream starts trickling over the ledge and winds its way down past boulders to the place the river once flowed. It's quite hard to make it out on the TV screen and so the story is replaced with storms in the capital and Karachi, political and meteorological. The next 24 hours will be critical.

******************************

It rained hard one night and water flooded some classrooms, having gushed down the chimneys. The cleaning lady found a soggy dead kitten in a corner and left it out with the rubbish. It was fascinating to the children how like a rat it was and how parts moved if poked just so. They tried sticks, shoes and fingers. (You go and wash your hands, sunshine, then come and show me. I need to smell the soap.) It moved and moved until it came alive again. The guard took of his jacket and build it a house. That day he did double duty guarding the gate and the the kitten's life, alert to signs of danger and disease.

I have since heard that it has made an officer's daughter a wonderful pet.

******************************

I have waited outside our office so many times: waited for meetings, waited for the postman, waited to go home. I find myself here again today, waiting, pacing. Then I am asked to sit down and talk. I face the mountains and we stare at each other blankly. I am told that due to circumstances we might have to leave any day now.

The month I envisaged dragging by is suddenly concentrated into a few days. I see what I am about to leave. Space intensifies with time and crystallises about me like a jewel. The next 24 hours could be critical. There is so much beauty that there is almost too much, as if about to swell and burst, overripe. There are flowers on the tree, red; there are flowers in the beds, pink; there's a bird's egg on the grass, blue; there are apricots on the tree, yellow. I'm not hungry but I go down to pick the fruit we've waited for all year. We watched as their blossom welcomed back spring and quickly fell. We watched the leaves bud and unfold and told off children for plucking their hard little knots of green fruit for weaponry. We've watched them soften and grow and today they are blushing. I eat a few but leave many more for seasons I will not see here. Friends will feast on them, slice and dry them, tire of them fresh and survive winter on them dry till those children, a year older, will climb again for their sour taste of a new year.

There's a hoopoe on the grass who appears to be two-faced, so beak-like is his pointed plume at the back. He's looking forwards and backwards; east and west; past and future.

The walnut tree is still preparing its nuts. I am surrounded by it, so stately, starting from its smooth white trunk and extending to dark boughs reaching out to fill space with wide leaves. I am humbled and suddenly feel apologetic, realising I have popped so many walnuts into my mouth this year without ever considering that these trees have poured so much nourishment into them and protected each one in its own little wooden case, padded about by fruit. Year after year these plants hold out their generous hands and say take, eat. I have been shown so much kindness.

Then a streak of yellow, a bird, describes a perfect parabola and is back up again in an instant. So steep and smooth is its dive, my own heart is in my mouth and my stomach lurches. Or maybe that's because I remember I'm leaving.

Season of kindness and cloud

It helps us to know we're alive when we see we are. We see our hands chop veg; our pen move at our impulse; the water wash over us and our feet tread paths. Our eyes remind us we're alive. Then the lights go out and what are we then? There is neither up nor down, right nor left; we have neither arms nor legs and can go neither forwards nor backwards when the power goes out. For a moment, on moonless nights, life bursts in our face and we fall into the darkness cursing ourselves for not carrying a light. (There are some dangers smokers don't face.)
We think very deeply about our lives. We are so profound, we have such depths. We think therefore we are. But what about a thought in the dark? I don't see that I am then. I need a lightbulb to know that.

Take Kevin and Harry, who were my small flatmates in Lahore. They are brothers aged 7 and 4 respectively with no access to a camera, a video camera or webcam, nor even the bathroom mirror, given their diminutive stature.
I was putting on my make-up (we see ourselves, remember) and I lowered the mirror for Harry. "Who's that, Harry?" I asked, as he looked at his reflection. "It's Kevin," he said.
He has not seen himself. He doesn't know he is.

Sometimes, before I light a light, I stumble to the door and step out into the night to see the stars and lose what's left of myself in the cosmos. The only real void is where the mountain was by day, no starlight shines through that. I contemplate distances and rootlessness, inter-planetary wandering and time-travel. Then I remember I quite like existence and don't need to add galactic loneliness to my lot so I go back in, light the lantern, rummage for a biscuit or make a chip butty - that'll weight me down some.
Tonight though, there is a moon, visible through a damp duvet of clouds so I am hemmed in, in a comforting, somewhat swaddled way and also orientated by this sky - the limit. There is up and there is down; here is east, there is west.

The cloud is also a comfort to the crops and fruit trees these days as it gently touches them with rain and makes them shine green all over. It is the season of kindness indeed. One neighbour brings me eggs, another clover; "fry and it's good" she tells me, and it is. Spring is lean on veg, but they found that. By the third bag of it, though, I'm being kind to my neighbour's pet rabbit.

A chap up the road is due to marry. His family had a foundation laying ceremony for the house he's preparing for his bride. The plans were drawn up. ("Should the windows really go behind the adjoining wall?" queried my friend.) The ground was cleared but then the work had to stop. "That peach tree-" the chap said kindly, "How can we chop it down in blossom so pink? Let's give it another year." And so his bride will wait.

The gardener in the office grounds loves creation too. You can see it in the way he handles plants and soil and splashes water. He found an ants' nest on Sunday. The pesky creatures swarmed out from under the flower pot he moved. The ground seethed with them and my skin crawled. All present leapt back horrified by the hidden fecundity of nature. Ant poison was unearthed and brandished over them. But was it a sin? Mali wanted to know. He was nervous about sprinkling it upon life. He was told it was not but felt in his heart it was, so he got a small duster and flicked some ants onto the lawn where they seemed to frolic with further abandon. "They're just like little children," he said.

I confess that though the chemist was kind and did not charge for the worm medicine, I will not be as affectionate to my parasites for a week, once a day before meals.

************************

There was glorious blue sky for some of our weekend trip, but only immediately overhead. All around, like a crown, there was thick cloud. "What a shame it's covering the view," I said to our boy-guide.
"What view?" he wondered.
"Of the mountains. My parents have come a long way to see them."
"Don't worry," he said, "they're the same at the top as they are at the bottom."

Now the cloud is total, pushing down heavy like a stone waiting to be rolled away. An elemental summit has been convened this evening, a meeting of earth and sky. They come together for fellowship, the clouds reaching downwards in their bulge and the mountains straining heavenwards. For weeks it has seemed something has been brewing, with cloud pouring out of craggy valleys in the high hills like steam from cauldrons. What mysteries do they communicate, what wonders do they work in their communion?
Sometimes, white reveals white as the cloud eases down or creeps to the side to reveal snow on rock behind. There is such sympathy between them as they reflect each other's colours and coldness and the attraction of weight to weight.

But mum and dad can and do see the clouds in England; we wait to see the crest of the Karakorum. Night falls and the curtain of cloud is torn in two to reveal what we've been hoping for: a display of strength and power and flashes of white from rock bottom to soaring spire.

A few hours later the sun rises and it is Easter Sunday.

Storeys

From an open warehouse, on plastic chairs, three workmen face the road. The radio is tuned to a minor key and the lovely Lata is lost, she sings, she always has been lost, not even her name is known but we will know her by her black eyes. 'Black eyes,' goes the chorus,'black, black eyes.' Their rough faces suggest they are waking up to the realisation that they have spent much of their lives waiting for deliveries of cement and the like but though the trucks have come and gone, delivered and left, do you know, a waiting remains, a longing.
They seem strengthened to have each other - an arm creeps round another's manly shoulders - and it is not long till namaz.
For this city was never meant to be just about concrete. So where the wealthy once carved lattice work into the upper portions of homes to mingle sky and stone or built airy pavilions atop palaces to imagine they sailed on the atmosphere, now ugly collections of storeys trail out into fanciful aviaries. Men still seem to want to possess some sky and so they have caged a portion in chicken wire and filled them with love birds and doves, the creatures that embody Lata's voice, refusing to be bound to earth, to be found. And so Lahore appears to have a floating extra storey, somewhere between architecture and air that will keep us all dreaming. Beyond that, the last wispy outposts of the city, forays into space, are paper kites.
At ground level, there were some birds on Thursday being taken for a ride. They were jungle green, caged in a hot-pink mesh and held aloft by a motorbike rider, steering with the other hand. The little pets thought they were flying, such was the thrill of speed and air, flying through crowded streets, the world a trap. And he, in turn, felt free as a bird.
On my street birds of a feather flock together. There are some bunnies in a tank, too, and some fish in bags, but mostly this bazaar is for the birds: pigeons, quails, sparrows (are not they sold two for a penny?) budgies, parrots, parakeets and fighting cocks. My little friend Harry, 4, is a true bon viveur. He lavishes equal love on these (not the cock, little man, fingers out) and the chickens at the poultry man's that his father might have killed for tea. There was Elephant Gate, Cavalry Gate and Camel Gate in the city's imperial fortress, but here is the Fine Feathered Friends Gate from where they are bought to make it a little easier for a struggling city to reach for the sky.

The animals here share their space with us.

To use public transport is to be farmed. Sheepdog conductors round us up, calling out to stray pedestrians, preying particularly on those of us who lack direction. They can spot us a mile off. We hear their cries and follow. One calls out, 'Yadgaar, yadgaar, yadgaar': 'Memorial, memorial, memorial' and reminds me where I want to be. We are herded and penned in and profits mean more than welfare in this industry. The conductor shuts the gate, as it were, and barks at the driver to leave. He slaps the side of the bus as if it's hide, whistles cajoling noises then enters traffic jams to negotiate paths through the jungle of vehicles. The driver jolts forward and stops. 'We're not leaving until you've filled this wagon,' he says, 'it's not worth it otherwise'. And so we wait.
Meanwhile a shepherd herds his sheep past the bus stop. It's a long way to meadow land from here but the little team of man and beasts look more purposeful than us lot, their curly hennaed heads bobbing forward methodically. They cannot be persuaded to go to Memorial - they have nothing to remember - nor to Regal Cinema, nor Race Course Park. Eyes down sheep, focus on pasture.

********************************

There is much mirth in the city. One kebab man chops frying onions in a red-hot rhythm using two knives like drum sticks. A welder is making sparks fly in time to his disco radio station. A bagpiper in tartan embraces a man with tears, it's been so long. Drivers get given a free balloon with every petrol purchase. They end up looking like inflated emergency bags except everyone is laughing. It serves my bus driver well when he barters it for two cigarettes and a matchstick - maybe it had been quite a stressful drive with that between him and the wheel after all.
On the basis of all this, I could call it 'Lahore: City of Smiles' but I fear the insipid tourist board would hijack the phrase and I don't want to help them who have sold off the Grande Dame of hotels, Falettis, to someone who has boarded it up so selfishly. Or worse, some Batchelor of Arts, Punjab (fail) will add to the plethora of two storey Humpty Dumpty Academies of Science, Kids Gardens for Grooming, English Grammatical Schools and Scholars' Hutches (I kid you not). Spare us, O spare us the Happy Smiling College of Lahore, A-levels a speciality.

In the few hours between the Punjabi pop being switched off for the night and dawn's azan an absurd noise tears the quiet and with it, the sense of all being well. A donkey brays, trying with its rude and amusing voice to be eloquent. It is hoarse, squeeky and unsteady. But I do not laugh at it; it is gut wrenching. I am not yet so away with the fairies that I can understand the speech of animals but I hear in my mind that it is raging about its hunger and bone-tiredness, its wounds from traffic and cruelty, its fear of the city. They share the space - and some stories - with people. And I rejoice greatly about how our king came to us; righteous and having salvation, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. We can be sure he has heard our stories, he has shared our space. He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.

Substance and Shadow

There are women in my neighbourhood from the 'mothers of a great nation' stock. It was fitting to celebrate the most recent Eid and think on Father Abraham with one such, whom I sometimes see on the path to school, always surveying her livestock and the offspring who graze or mill about her. She is vast, built for a lifetime of service to cattle. Her scarf barely skims her bosom where a similar-sized one would normally swamp other women. She never moves. Her still, stable solidity seems to keep her flock safe. She is their centre of gravity, they will not stray. I pass her and greet her but she never turns her head to look at me. She does not say hello but always, 'come in and eat something.' So it was good to be able to accept that day after months of having to decline and say, 'got to get to school you know.' One of her sons attends our school. I police him more than I teach him.
Inside, lesser family members revolve around her. Her scrap of a father in law is hunched in blankets in the corner and croaks out a small greeting to me. Brothers in law come and go and fail to make an impression. Children scuttle hither and thither but only this lady of such ample carriage has any standing. Her clothes, all the length and breadth of them, are deep red. Before her sit three large cauldrons from which she ladles out meat, tea and veg with one hand while changing a nappy and swaddling a baby with the other. she smooths down cloth, positions the baby on it and with a deft flick of the wrist flips him over once, twice and back again and lo and behold he is a tightly bound Christmas present with a face. There won't be any more bother from him.
I struggle to know what to talk about with this capable woman. After all, what has chat ever done to help rear her young? 'You must have had an early start to cook all this today,' I attempt. 'Every morning is an early morning,' she replies, and casts her gaze over the assemblage of children. 'Ah, yes, I suppose it is.' I shovel more rice in, obediently.
I feel it would not be well received to tell this bastion of womanhood that I didn't want too much as I wasn't feeling too well. Everything she feeds thrives; she has never heard of ill-health or reduced appetites in man or beast. So I go home feeling green but it doesn't do to be on one's own on Eid so shortly there are knocks at the door as women come to invite me round. 'My health,' I stammer weakly. This buys me neither time nor space. 'Oh no! Alone and unwell!' That will never do. And in they come, kicking off their shoes. 'Salty tea or sweet?' I ask as I hobble through to put the kettle on. I fish around for something to feed them and find the remains of my birthday snacks to fry up. (Nothing goes off in this weather.) It transpires none of the children are well either as they all cough and splutter into their cups of tea (salty) and my room takes on the air of a hospital. A neighbour of ours had a baby recently, by c-section, so the conversation turns to childbirth. 'If you work hard in pregnancy,' one woman informs us, 'you should never have difficulty in childbirth and never have to have one of those operations.' Her tone is derisive. 'Take my lot, for example,' and she paused to tot them up: '...eleven, twelve, thirteen. I had thirteen of them, never took more than an hour for one of them.'

The tea and conviviality had a reviving affect. Maybe there is something in not leaving a patient alone after all.

A trip is planned to go and visit the sister of some friends who has moved to the other end of town after she got married. I am keen to visit her after her life has so completely changed. After more tea and more refusals of sweets and kebabs and slices of roast and cake we bundle into the car, dressed as chic as possible in the bitingly cold air. We pull off into the night. We pass a few huddled figures moving from one meal to the next. It's known locally as the festival of meat. 'Don't worry,' said one lady who fed me the night before, 'it's not like the last Eid, all salads and chickpeas. You'll only get meat this time.'

We keep overtaking a motorbike that stops and starts, stops and starts. Every time it stops the passenger gets down and pushes it, running, head down, sleeves rolled up. Then it starts and he rides for a minute, then pushes till sweat drips from his brow like it's July. Mr Front Seat stares forward, oblivious as to whether his bike is powered by fossil-fuel or friend's brawn. He cares not if his energy source is sustainable. I marvel at the strength of their friendship that would keep a man pushing.

We begin to wind through an unfamiliar part of town where there is no electricity right now. I peer out into the darkness. Most people will be inside around fires and floor-cloths that speak of plenty. Then a cold square of gas-light flares into view. In a dirty white-washed diner, three men sit hunched over their plastic tables as a boy wipes up. A lonely steel pan simmers. I hold the child on my lap closer and turn back to face the cosiness in the car. We're laughing at song lyrics and I'm glad to be with friends.

**********************************

The stove is my centre of gravity, I shall not be cold. Its warmth, its quiet voice and the occasional funny noises it makes as it expands, contracts and plays with wood chips makes it like a friend whose side you don't want to leave. Nipping into the kitchen I am cold and fretful, hurrying the washing-up, the only job I have not been able to bring to do by the fireside. I have moved my desk so I sit almost on top of the stove. From there, I mark exam scripts, chop vegetables, read and pray. I can lean over and give the onions a stir or brew tea thick and fast. I've forgotten why it was that houses were ever built so big. The other rooms are cold places, voids.

**********************************

This morning when I had no reason to wake early I woke early and pulled back the curtains for the light that the electric company is currently unable to provide. I caught the mountain iced and the first rays of the sun burning off the cloud. I have never seen this mountain silver and white before, as I only see the south face. Seeing the cloud linger and then slowly peel back reminds me of my own reluctance to pull back the blankets these days and expose myself to the cold. But, by the time I've had my breakfast, there the mountain is again, stone and still, standing guard over the city with no sign of ever having slumbered. I take my cue and get out myself.

I am trying to escape the shadow of the mountain looming over me so I walk north to the middle of the valley which basks in the sun when, as this morning, it comes out. I walk along the ledge to see the river and see my shadow moving sometimes along the rocky bank far below, sometimes over dried grass in winter orchards or barren land. It is cut up by the long lines of poplar shadows. The shadow has a great big chadar flapping about it and no clear shape I can call my own. For a moment it seems I am watching another woman's life - one who walks in dry remote places. Then I wonder how much is she me or I her?

very happy moments and golden youth

It was my fault. I should never have told my maths class it was going to be my birthday the next day. Just because they'd multiplied 6 by 5 it didn't mean I had to say any more than that they'd got the answer right; keep up the good work.
And so I find myself locked out of my classroom, concerned about the number of unsheathed pairs of scissors inside and the number of days till exams. We still haven't done triangles. Someone is arranging furniture inside and someone is lunging somewhere.
Eventually the door is opened by a giggly gaggle of girls who stand back proudly to reveal a blackboard full of balloons and Happy Birth Day Miss chalked up where I'd hoped to be reviewing acute and obtuse angles. As if to compensate, a large triangular package (isosceles) is thrust into my arms. I now notice that everyone has brought a gift, laid beside their pencils and exercise books. I received:
1 bouquet (the triangular package, made in China)
10 items for the hair
2 earrings
48 bangles
1 picture frame
1 picture of the Simpson family
2 items of unknown name and/or purpose
1 mug saying 'I love you.'
1 piece of tapestry, made by a pupil's aunt.

The cards were full of good wishes:
"may very happy moment continue all year through."
"God! give you Beautiful future"
"Happy longlife"

I was told that, in the same way that roses are red and violets are blue, I am sweet, like sugar is. I was told that my 'golden youth is like a picture' (of Marge, Maggie or Lisa?) and that 'Our miss Hanna/Likes to eat banana/she like honey/and also like a bunny/she like to act/ and the light reflect. Whilst thankful to be reflecting light on the one hand, I hung my head in shame on the other. Who has been teaching them English? Who? My only consolation is I have not asked them to write a poem for the final exam; I won't have to read any more year 4 verse. Stick to prose kids, you're much better at that. (While I think of it, I might drop the triangle question from the maths paper, too.)

Azhar has been a very good boy so he is allowed to go to the store cupboard, walking not running please, to bring the big drum, carrying it very carefully please. So off he belts and is back in an instant with the drum, broken, and two pieces of firewood to hit it with. He beats out a rhythm that the boys flick their wrists to, stamp and swirl to, cock their heads to. Aah golden youth.

Thus the day at school continued, punctuated by snippets of teaching and learning: Aesop's Fables, The Enormous Turnip, the Age of Exploration, magic 'e' and where babies come from (well, that's what Nouman had chosen to research.)

Back at home the party wasn't swinging so much as swimming - in oil. The kebabs and spring rolls I'd got in were taken over by my colleagues who decided there wasn't enough oil in the frying pan. They ladled it in and we had cream cake for afters. I'm not sure I will have such a longlife.

Travelling Companions

If we read to know we are not alone then I have found a close companion in Dervla Murphy in her book, Where the Indus is Young: Travelling in Baltistan. I am rereading it under a vast weight of blanket not too far from where she wrote it, under an even more ample weight. I have come in from the cold and have brewed a degchi of tea and am reading her book, the part where she has just returned from a frozen landscape and is brewing a degchi of tea to thaw out. It's as if we're sharing a pot and having adult conversation about the Karakoram. However, since it was too cold for her to ever undress and wash and too remote to find anything other than apricots and sometimes lentils to eat, if she saw me (clean-ish, well-fed) she'd justifiably react like the great explorer Thesiger did when he met Eric Newby and his friend after their 'short walk' in the Hindu Kush: 'pansies'. But I am heartened to read that even she "despaired of ever being able to convey in words any adequate picture of this region. Everything is so extreme here that language loses its power."
For I too am struggling. I have just returned from my own even shorter walk to a glacier and would love to be able to convey the solemnity of inching upwards between the walls of a mighty canyon to approach a whole congregation of peaks enthroned ahead. The trepidation one feels is partly natural: O, that my foot may not slip, that the mountains may not tremble and fall and O, that the icy waters may not pass over me. But partly it is awe.
I would love to describe an uncanny silence: the space so vast, the sounds so small; the sense of being lost in a landscape, trespassing where we don't belong; the unearthly power of the place. But to do so, I'd be lying. Yes, yes, sure the silence is broken by the sound of water rushing through the gorge and the echoes of rock falls sometimes ringing out. But the truth is, I never had a chance to attain such lucidity or even hear such sounds. I was interrupted not by a six-year old such as Dervla Murphy had for her travelling companion (her daughter Rachel) but by the fourteen thirteen-year-olds whose geography field trip I was helping to conduct.
Picking my way over scree or conglomerates of pebbles I am overtaken by boys pretending convincingly they are on motorbikes. I am trying to consider the insignificance of man and his perilous existence when I was told that he is hitting her. (She started it.) Can they have their apples yet? Please miss. Where are Ali's biscuits? Was there anywhere Faizan could charge his phone? He'd brought his charger. A quick survey of the scene revealed that no, there was not. (But did I think there might be somewhere soon? A socket among the rocks?) Anyway, not for want of trying, no one fell in the river or got a stone in their eye.
That day the glacier retreated at an unprecedented rate. Scientists, be concerned. One has not reached it until one has eaten it, it is believed, so the children chipped off ice to have with their lunch.

****************************

Shadow here is not a vague thing. It is not nebulous, not ephemeral, not shadowy in that sense. When the shadow of the mountain to our south passes over us in the early afternoon of a sunny day, it turns hot to cold, light to dark and day almost to night. If the North Wind and Jack Frost talk to people in children's stories, then Shadow can touch you in real life. At 2:20 today we said goodbye to the sun till tomorrow morning and for signs of daylight looked upwards to the south faces of the mountains across the valley. We are plunged into a gloomy grey of rock frozen in shadow. But far above, where the snow has never melted, the sunlight blazes pink and rosy orange before nightfall and it's as if it's summer there, the only warm place in the world, a Himalayan Hawaii.

Power and the People's Party

Before the electricity gives up the ghost, sparks sometimes fly. They fly from the wires in displays of fireworks. I passed a pylon once when blue fizzled and flashed. I remembered, remembered the 5th of November when I had turned homeward after a good show happy to have been so dazzled when - surprise - the encore stopped me in my tracks. It happened again there on that path. I'd just got back on my way when rockets whizzed out of a Catherine wheel and then exploded into blue fire and smoke. Then, at last, I got going.

Electric blue: it's also the colour of the river we cross on a wooden bridge for the school trip to the power station where the water hurtles past three turbines and generates enough electricity for the whole city (as long as we're good and turn off the lights). But the water looks so charged that the children think the electricity is in the water and our power station somehow extracts it. Gravity is too serious, too prosaic an explanation. The children also do a lot of hurtling past the turbines too, and generate enough sound energy to supply another city. The engineers stay safely in their control room smoking and, um, controlling things, yes, that's what they're doing, from comfy chairs strewn around. A peon comes out and offers my colleague and me tea but the wiring of their tin kettle looks dodgy and we decline. They leave us explain to the kids what D-A-N-G-E-R means. One impudent child, Lisa Simpson, asks a foreman if it's not dangerous to smoke here. He takes a drag and in a cloud of smoke asks her why ever should she think that. 'Fire and electricity,' she says archly, 'they don't mix'.
I assess that she has learned and is able to apply the learning objectives of Monday's science and safety lesson.
He stubs out his cigarette and turns to leave. We were such a cute group until she opened her mouth. We too leave and eat our packed lunches downstream.

Nature is also going out in a blaze of colour. There's the new blue of the river as glaciers cease pouring out their torrent of melt water that in summer churns up sediment that gives the river the appearance of much tea. My garden wall is purple with vine leaves who seem to be trying to apologise for not bearing any purple fruit. Above it, the fig tree that did bear fruit (purple) is yellow. And so, increasingly, is every tree in the valley.

The colour is rising.

Election fever has infected the town and every street, every wall and post-box, bus-stop and pillar is positively gangrenous, bursting with green bunting and angry red banners. It has blinded the populous to nature's more decorous display. One taxi driver is blinded to more than just decorum, too: on his windscreen there's a banner telling us to support the party symbolised by the bicycle. It's all empty words; the way he's driving he doesn't support cyclists at all. I should have taken another cab.
Most of these other cabs have been commandeered by boys, some of whom will have to wait a good few years before they'll be enfranchised but can't wait till the procession begins soon when they will open the sunroof and stand as tall as they can for their age, raising high a picture of a waving gent and flags of his chosen symbol: a kerosene lamp, arrow, kite, bike or one of several constellations of a moon and star. They'll honk their horns, play some tunes and bellow a name and slogan memorably so that on the great day two weeks hence we'll be swayed by that carnival memory and tick - now whose was the kite box again?
The men who've set up campaign stands are all wearing sunglasses these overcast days. They are looking forward to a bright future, you see; and there are a lot of luminaries around.

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The betrothed is swathed in orange, the orange like that of autumn leaves: sad. This is her engagement party and I have never seen my friend looking so sad. She is pinned into place by safety pins down the back of her dress and the stares of the women who will be her world one day: a host of in-law aunts, their unnumbered offspring and in the middle of them all, one supreme Mother-In-Law-To-Be, the queen bee, the victor who has won this precious jewel of a girl.
(The fiance sends his apologies. Work, you know.)

There are no party games. No music (until the in-laws leave). No chatter, crackers or clink of glasses, just a long hard stare at this latest addition to the clan. She is beautiful when she is happy.
When the men are done and only their cigarette smoke lingers, it's feeding time for us. This lounge is normally a terribly civilised arrangement of 1 coffee table, 1 vase of flowers and a 3-piece suite but now is 2 parallel feeding troughs. Bums down, tuck in. If you can't reach what you want, lady, lean further.
Everyone is eating more than the recommended daily allowance and soon scarves hang limp, lipstick is smudged, tissues litter the floor, women are on top of each other, some laughing raucously, most shouting to be heard.
A nephew walks in. "People's Party of Pakistan," he says, and walks out. Nobody noticed.

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In early winter there are days when we are surrounded by cloud not mountains. On such days it is a cozier, moister and more muffled place than when the sides of mountains stare us down and make us feel small, lonely and lost. Under the staff tree, we stamp our feet, sit closer on the bench so our shawls touch and brew tea in the first break because we can't wait till one.

But then sometimes the clouds part and a distant valley between two hills in the sky is revealed, or an alpine meadow - sometimes basking in sunlight - comes into view. They are impossibly remote and I wonder why I never saw them before on clearer days.

Then I remember the songs we sang in Sunday School.